BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN can relax. The rock star who once sang “There’s 57 channels and nothing on” was surely just waiting for the arrival of television on demand.

In the very near future, most of us could be composing our own television schedules every night through the internet, industry leaders predicted yesterday.

Yahoo!, which claims to be the world’s most popular website, introduced a video search engine this week. Google is testing a similar service, which it claims will do for television what its search engine did for the internet. Microsoft and the BBC also have video search projects in development.

Yet the media behemoths do not have the field to themselves: Blinkx, a small British group, is up and running with a video search service of its own. Suranga Chandratillake, its co-founder and chief technology officer, said that the modern vision for internet television was simple: “It’s about allowing viewers to make their own TV channels.

“I will be able to go online in the evening and watch the latest news followed by my favourite sitcom from the 1980s and then jump into the latest Hollywood blockbuster.”

Blinkx’s service is built around hundreds of voice- recognition computers, originally developed by the East Anglia technology company Autonomy and used by the US Department of Homeland Security to eavesdrop on al-Qaeda terrorists. The machines have catalogued every spoken word in 55,000 hours of news programmes, television shows, music videos, sports highlights and films owned by Blinkx’s partner companies, which include the BBC, Fox News, CNN and Reuters.

Armed with this information, Blinkx can go straight to any moment in a particular programme that interests a user, Mr Chandratillake said.

“For instance, I’m a big fan of The Simpsons and I can remember my favourite lines, but I don’t know which episodes and which series they came from. With our system, you will be able to type your favourite line into our search engine and find that moment,” he said.

The unresolved question is how to make the service pay, both for the search engines and the copyright owners, he said.

“There’s no technological barrier to this. The only barrier is commercial now: the people who own the content deciding that they want to make this happen and working out how to make it happen. I don’t think it will be free — it never is.”

Blinkx’s partners are experimenting with various commercial models: the BBC footage is free, Reuters and Fox News play adverts, CNN is a subscription service. Movie Link, another partner, is “a sort of internet pay-per-view service for the latest Hollywood films”, Mr Chandratillake said.

“Nobody knows which method will stick. It will probably be a mix of them all, but I would be surprised if most of us are not watching television over the internet in five years’ time. We may not realise it, because it may be delivered through something that looks like a television.” In Japan that change is happening already. Last month Fujitsu released a computer/television hybrid with a hard disk that can record up to 483 hours of programmes. Costing less than 400,000 yen (£2,020), it is cheaper than some televisions.

Yahoo!’s service, like Google’s, is less sophisticated than the Blinkx system and relies on “captions” tagged to film clips on the web. However, with their global reach, billions of web-page records and vast finances, both companies may easily dominate the next generation of television viewing.

Theresa Wise, a partner at Accenture, the technology consultancy, said that Yahoo!’s video search service was “just the tip of the iceberg”.

She said: “We are seeing, through the internet and through satellite TV services, a shift in the way that people watch television. People in the industry are realising that companies such as Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft occupy gatekeeper positions which are going to become massively important.”

“The kind of question people are asking themselves now is: just what would happen if Google were to strike a deal with Hollywood?”

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